Yes. Modern knowledge of physics. As in "No, I shouldn't take damage becasue I said I was running extra metal straps across the joints and used copper and silver links for the chain instead of steel and left grounding strips dragging from my ankles so that electricity wouldn't affect me as much."

I fully understand that any given suit of metal armour might (or might not) act as a Faraday cage. I'm not going to let a player construct one to those specifications and have an effect on the game. I will neither hunt them down with electric wielding enemies, nor let them get a reduction of damage for their efforts. If it comes, it will affect them.

Well, all of physics is obviously not ignored. Gravity holds visible-scale chunks of matter in compact bundles like planets, rather than letting them spread into a fine haze. Springs can still store and release energy (bows, etc.). Inclined planes, screws and pulleys work. (Below the visible scale, who knows, but I suspect that de-tuning the weak and strong nuclear forces would make it really tricky to get familiar conditions at the visible scale.)

Spreading into applied physics, chemical reactions work (even gunpowder combustion, which is specially called out as not working in many other campaign worlds). Biology usually works as expected (although with so many exceptions that "usually" might be too strong a word).

My guess would be that a wizard's lightning bolt is magically-generated electricity, and it obeys physics after the spell stops directing it. God-generated "lightning", however, might be a pure stream of magical energy that just looks like lightning to uninformed mortals.

So basically, I'm thinking things on Golarion act like things on Earth whenever the extra force we call magic isn't involved. Earth physics plus magic, rather than a totally different set of underlying principles that happens to produce many of the exact same results at the visible scale.

There's nothing wrong with a player saying that. It's not what his character does or does not know that determines the rules of physics, and if a player knows more than his character knows, there is nothing wrong with him questioning you, out of character.

As I said, it's still up to the DM to determine how close the in game physics really are to reality, but to say you can't question about something a character wouldn't know about is silly and confused.

Appropriate response: "No, physics don't work that way in my game"

A!+#@++ DM response: "You deserve what comes next because you think your normal old armor fits the description of a Faraday suit, even though your character was just wearing it as armor, I don't like that you as a player question my implementation and so I'm going to channel my insecurity into vengeful punishment."

"modern knowledge of physics" - that's cute. The fun thing about physics is that it doesn't really care what you do or do not know.

Hear, hear. When I was a kid, people said that bumblebee flight violated the laws of physics. That didn't make bumblebees magic, it meant that we didn't understand all of the physics involved. Now we understand a lot more about the lifting effects of wingtip vortices and other fiddly bits of aerodynamics, and bumblebee flight isn't so mysterious any more.

All this from fighter/wizard/cleric/rogue balancing! Aren't tangents fun?

"modern knowledge of physics" - that's cute. The fun thing about physics is that it doesn't really care what you do or do not know.

Hear, hear. When I was a kid, people said that bumblebee flight violated the laws of physics. That didn't make bumblebees magic, it meant that we didn't understand all of the physics involved. Now we understand a lot more about the lifting effects of wingtip vortices and other fiddly bits of aerodynamics, and bumblebee flight isn't so mysterious any more.

All this from fighter/wizard/cleric/rogue balancing! Aren't tangents fun?

It's not just the physics there; people were completely missing the fact that the bumblebee wing twists to position itself to create lift on the backstroke as well, unlike birds who only create lift from the primary stroke.

A%**$~@ DM response: "You deserve what comes next because you think your normal old armor fits the description of a Faraday suit, even though your character was just wearing it as armor, I don't like that you as a player question my implementation and so I'm going to channel my insecurity into vengeful punishment."

But... But... Everyone knows that roleplaying games are just a sandbox for sociopathic GM's to murder their players as often as possible in as many obscure ways as they can think of! At least those were the GM's I grew up playing with.

Although I will say that Finger of Death is a more direct and less shocking way to kill a character...

Armour functioning as a Faraday cage is not anticipated in the rules. Just because there are some designs that might do so under the right conditions, is not a reason to let it be a part of play. Magically generated electric affects are intended to have an effect on equipment and entities that don't have resistance to them.

I guess I'm closer to an A&&$$!* DM than an appropriate one, then. I haven't had any complaints of note, but maybe it's just that my players wouldn't bother.

I'm not sure why you feel that insecurities and vengeance have anything to do with it. I've already said that I'm not going to hunt them down with electric effects just because they think they are immune. I just don't feel like I'd let a player manipulate the game mechanics in that particular fashion. You can certainly do different, and I promise not to hate you or accuse you of being vengeful or insecure for not agreeing with me.

But... But... Everyone knows that roleplaying games are just a sandbox for sociopathic GM's to murder their players as often as possible in as many obscure ways as they can think of! At least those were the GM's I grew up playing with.

"Alright...Time for my 4th character of this campaign...." Steady thumping of head to table.

Realism in RPGs has to take a backseat to the laws of drama and genre conventions sometimes.

With as many spells as there are in Pathfinder, someone should have figured out the underlying "grammar" and "syntax" by now. Add rigorous study (by people with Intelligence scores beyond normal human limits, mind you), and some halfway rigorous experimentation, and I suspect you'll eventually wind up with Rick Cook-style magical programming languages.

The big nations have money. (If they run low, they can send some adventurers to dig up some more from the hundreds of caches all over the place.) Given how easy it is for wizards to make them, army officers should be routinely issued at least +1 swords. I wouldn't be surprised if some enlisted men and women had them, too. Extend that to other areas of magic, and you've got Harry Turtledove's Darkness series coming up fast.

In the interest of playing in the swords and sorcery genre, players and GMs agree to set those implications of the rule system aside. If a player wants to violate those genre conventions with purpose-built Faraday cage armor, I'd support the GM responding by hiding a few Shadowrun books behind his or her screen, and "modernizing" Golarion in short order.

If a player wants to violate those genre conventions with purpose-built Faraday cage armor, I'd support the GM responding by hiding a few Shadowrun books behind his or her screen, and "modernizing" Golarion in short order.

If a player wants to violate those genre conventions with purpose-built Faraday cage armor, I'd support the GM responding by hiding a few Shadowrun books behind his or her screen, and "modernizing" Golarion in short order.

No. Only someone who tries to argue that the fae's ball of lightning won't affect them because they are wearing heavy armour that they've specifically designed to protect them from electricity.

(edit: I might, on my own, decide to give them a chance of it protecting them. But I won't let someone use a modern knowledge of physics to bypass a magical effect that I don't think was intended to be bypassed in that way.)

There's a simple way to quantify how difficult it is to make armor that prevents damage from magical electricity.

I'll repeat it to you once more: if that's the level of realism you want in your campaign as DM, great. There are ways to handle that.

What I've been saying all along is if you want to use arguments based in realism, here's realism for you.

Since you are not the one who was making that original argument, you jumped into the discussion taking it out of context, and have refused to shift your view to said context.

Ok, fine. That explains the dissonance to me on that topic.

On another point you bring up though

Quote:

I guess I'm closer to an A&&$$!* DM than an appropriate one, then.

It's not being an a&$#%%* to say your campaign isn't too realistic in that particular way. But to say that in a really a@*%@$$ way, and immediately react negatively to players asking questions along those lines is being an a$&$@%%. I was pretty clear about how I said it the first time around. Trying to twist my words to mean something you know they didn't mean isn't going to get you anywhere but frustrated and confused.

Since you are not the one who was making that original argument, you jumped into the discussion taking it out of context, and have refused to shift your view to said context.

Actually, I jumped into that particular part of the conversation (because I'd made at least one earlier comment in the thread) by making a light-hearted joke about Faraday suits and fashion which I finished with a smiley that had a wink and a tongue stuck out.

After which, things rapidly descended into pretty clear implications about the appalling state of my DM style.

I won't say I regret the joke, because I thought it was funny. I do regret the way it was taken and what's happened since. I won't speak to this any more.

A caster can pretty much make the lightning go in any direction, yes? That tells me the trick isn't so much generating electrical energy as it is in creating a path that the charge is forced to travel. Otherwise, generating a huge electrical charge in your palm would just lead to your on electrocution, right? (unless you also completely insulate yourself. You still wouldn't be able to control the direction of the bolt though, it would pass straight down into the ground unless you are really close to your target).

This also fits with the RPG trope of lightning bolts flying in a straight line through a target and continuing in the same direction - not into the ground. This path that is generated has lower resistance than metal, thus it is impossible to shield yourself using a faraday suit when assaulted with a magically generated lightning bolt.

Magic, by definition, violates the natural laws of the mundane world. If it were not so, it would be called "science".

Arguing about how magical electricity responds to physical laws is like claiming that your imaginary friend can beat up my imaginary friend. It's not just pointless, it's literally meaningless.

None of this has anything to do with the question of whether heavily-armored classes bring their group a positive wins-above-replacement versus adding another wizard instead, in any likely PFO scenario.

Any sufficiently advanced benevolence may be indistinguishable from malevolence.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from a genuine kook.

There will have two ways, in my opinion, to work with the armor/moviment system:

1) Minimizing the diferences: Easy mode. Just make the Heavy Armor higher feats slow less and less until the difference to Light/Cloth being at 10-20% and make the Cloth Armor higher feats higher the defense to be near the heavy one. Light and Medium will need a balanced look.

In this case, all armor will have big differences in lower levels, and small differences in higher ones.

2) Balancing the outcome: Hard mode. Balancing all the variants in a combat (different types of protections, movimentation, damage output, dps, types of damage, etc...) for every level/class is something that Blizzard trying to reach about 10 years of WoW and seems to give up lasts years.

This is the best option, in my opinion. But I think they will, by this way, reproduce the differences from TT game, where some classes are simply not well rounded while others will be imba.

If you want lightning to function like normal lightning THEN take into consideration the laws of physics, but that comes AFTER the question i asked way the hell back in post #91 about whether you think the spell should magically summon mundane lightning or magical lightning. Clearly I've been discussing the former and what that entails, so to respond to that as if I were discussing the latter is a reply that has not been following from the start. I get it, it's a lot to expect to follow, but just a reminder at this point of where you're really leaping into the conversation.

In the TT games I played, heavy fighters were useful because they could survive close combat. The terrain often had fights play out in close and confined quarters where fighters had an edge - or at least minimized their disadvantages. Fighters might lose some of that edge in an open world, where they often don't get to pick their terrain. But with lots of hits points and damage resistance, they might do well in War of the Towers, or when contesting specific ground in raids or war.

So you're going to play the victim? You're comment about how a player who asked what I asked deserves what comes next came first. Don't go there if you don't want things to go there ;)

Caldeathe, as I'm sure you've noticed, is one of the good guys around here; he neither whines, agitates, nor trolls. He attempts to keep, and succeeds at keeping, the community informed and entertained, and I don't believe anything he's said--when interpreted through the lens of his intent--deserves the ire he's receiving.

Wink emoticon notwithstanding, please consider giving the guy the benefit of the doubt, and thus also giving him a break.

Wink emoticon notwithstanding, Caldeathe, as I'm sure you've noticed, is one of the good guys around here; he neither whines, agitates, nor trolls. He attempts to keep, and succeeds at keeping, the community informed and entertained, and I don't believe anything he's said--when interpreted through the lens of his intent--deserves the ire he's receiving.

Please consider giving the guy the benefit of the doubt, and thus also giving him a break.

Sure, no problem. There are a lot of people here calling themselves and their buddies the "good guys". I take that with a grain of salt as well.

To me, the good guys around here are the ones with an interest in forming us all into one community, and an apparent preference toward letting that one community divide itself up into warring factions only once we have a game to play elsewhere than these boards. I believe Caldeathe is one of those; not many others of us have consistently been.

This guy's not quite in full plate armor, but it's still enough armor to really make the point that if your armor restricts your mobility then it was probably made by a drunken halfling shoemaker: http://youtu.be/257qFxJhGU0

I read Wurner's comment several times, and I don't believe it matters whether the lightning itself is magical or mundane.

Wurner wrote:

A caster can pretty much make the lightning go in any direction, yes? That tells me the trick isn't so much generating electrical energy as it is in creating a path that the charge is forced to travel. Otherwise, generating a huge electrical charge in your palm would just lead to your on electrocution, right? (unless you also completely insulate yourself. You still wouldn't be able to control the direction of the bolt though, it would pass straight down into the ground unless you are really close to your target).

This also fits with the RPG trope of lightning bolts flying in a straight line through a target and continuing in the same direction - not into the ground. This path that is generated has lower resistance than metal, thus it is impossible to shield yourself using a faraday suit when assaulted with a magically generated lightning bolt.

His point seems to be that the magical part of it is the part that directs the lightning to travel along the desired path. This seems to me like a really good answer to the general problem at hand.

What Nihimon said. Feel free to use that for any future TSV-published book on the physics of magic (as long as you credit the shaggy, mushroom-eating, illiterate Kellid Wurner for it. Ha, wouldn't that be fun?)

Magic, by definition, violates the natural laws of the mundane world. If it were not so, it would be called "science".

Arguing about how magical electricity responds to physical laws is like claiming that your imaginary friend can beat up my imaginary friend. It's not just pointless, it's literally meaningless.

None of this has anything to do with the question of whether heavily-armored classes bring their group a positive wins-above-replacement versus adding another wizard instead, in any likely PFO scenario.

The man has a point, I'm not sure if the intent is to intentionally derail this conversation so the mage players could cement their upper hand, but everyone seems to be doing a great job of it.

I for one am in favor of a system where your encumbrance is independant of your armor except as a function of its weight. Lets let heavily armored fighters be slowed because their armor weighs a stone, and their carrying another 3 stones weight in their pack where as the light and medium armored fighters will reach their encumbrance much less quickly. Lets not penalize them twice. Add to this an endurance bar that drains more quickly when encumbered and i think everything will be fine.

Early in the combat the fighter will need to close the gap because if he doesn't the cloth armored mage's endurance will last longer and allow him to flee more easily. That to me seems a fair balance.

Based on theory alone light armored warriors should make pretty mean mage killers. Loin cloth for the win!

Ranged heavy/medium armored "turret" fighters might also be pretty effective machines of destruction (though obviously would struggle finishing anything and even to keep up with a fast moving group).

How to make heavy / medium armor work for melee in general without an abundance of gap closers / roots remains to be seen. It is very hard to try to come up with any solution which would work outside formations without swinging the balance too much the other way.

Armor / encumbrance affecting movement speed is really going to a tough thing to make work both in and outside combat.

There a couple of ways, combined, that might make kiting less dominant. One way was discussed in an archery thread; require archers (and mages) to be still for some time while they fire. It might be that they just can't fire on the move or they have fire-on-the-move feats that are less accurate. The other part of it depends on how opportunity attacks are handled; if light fighters can close with the shooters and do damage when/if the shooters try to disengage, then the heavy death-dealers have time to close. (So the light fighters and rogues are tacklers, surviving long enough for the heavies to close.)

I think the reality is that our tactics will evolve over time, based on the rule set. As PFO changes from PF for game-play reasons (say, giving Wizards a large number of shots), then the rest of the game is also altered. Maybe in the end light fighters are much more common in PFO than in PF, just like in our world where armor was slowly modified or discarded to respond to more prevalent effective missile fire.

There is nothing for fighters to fear. If you are a fighter, you are pure badass. If you are a wizard, you can wiggle your fingers and the world dies.

TL;DR: All roles will be balanced and viable for MVP with change expected for continuous improvement throughout the entire lifecycle of the game

Lots of balance to come. Lots of time to influence fighter design.

Fear should not drive design decisions.

There are write-ups on aggro that state fighters are likely to be the only class that can handle large groups well in PVE. Comments with numbers have been provided to a degree around ranged fighters. 95% of the community isn't even in-game yet, but even with the limited numbers, a lot of empirical information has been provided. Feats still need implementing, skills and interactions between systems are still being included every minute of every hour of every day. Fighters seem to do fine in PVP but have some deficiencies that the devs have outlined are going to be fixed if they haven't been already.

Scared you can't run as fast as a mage, play a mage. Otherwise, look at what tools to have at your disposal, try it and adapt it for your survival and playstyle. All roles are going to be viable. Min-maxers might show you a path to mage-godhood in theorycraftland, but we all make choices.

Not sure why alarm bells are going off now... or ever. We have information, we know things are changing, we know that we can influence the change, we will be receiving updated information with each playtest and can ask the alpha testers to confirm or validate aspects.

I wasn't referring to them being racially stupid, that's profiling, I'm not racist!

I was referring to the entire idea of them and their inclusion in the Dragonlance setting as being a stupid design choice that should never have been made.

I disrespectfully disagree. For a comic relief element in an incredibly dark and depressing story (Chronicles/Legends), the Kender were perfect. I would argue (and often do) that Tas is the main character of the story, based on the criteria that a protagonist usually grows and becomes better during the course of a story.

I wasn't referring to them being racially stupid, that's profiling, I'm not racist!

I was referring to the entire idea of them and their inclusion in the Dragonlance setting as being a stupid design choice that should never have been made.

I disrespectfully disagree. For a comic relief element in an incredibly dark and depressing story (Chronicles/Legends), the Kender were perfect. I would argue (and often do) that Tas is the main character of the story, based on the criteria that a protagonist usually grows and becomes better during the course of a story.

No one grows more than Tas does in DragonLance (Chron/Leg).

They are the Jar Jar Binks of fantasy. Some stories can only be made worse by introducing unnecessarily childish comic relief.

I wasn't referring to them being racially stupid, that's profiling, I'm not racist!

I was referring to the entire idea of them and their inclusion in the Dragonlance setting as being a stupid design choice that should never have been made.

I disrespectfully disagree. For a comic relief element in an incredibly dark and depressing story (Chronicles/Legends), the Kender were perfect. I would argue (and often do) that Tas is the main character of the story, based on the criteria that a protagonist usually grows and becomes better during the course of a story.

No one grows more than Tas does in DragonLance (Chron/Leg).

They are the Jar Jar Binks of fantasy. Some stories can only be made worse by introducing unnecessarily childish comic relief.

I must again disagree.

The emotional scenes with Tasslehoff (ex. when Fizban dies in Chronicles) are some of the most gut-wrenching scenes in the whole series.

I wasn't referring to them being racially stupid, that's profiling, I'm not racist!

I was referring to the entire idea of them and their inclusion in the Dragonlance setting as being a stupid design choice that should never have been made.

I disrespectfully disagree. For a comic relief element in an incredibly dark and depressing story (Chronicles/Legends), the Kender were perfect. I would argue (and often do) that Tas is the main character of the story, based on the criteria that a protagonist usually grows and becomes better during the course of a story.

No one grows more than Tas does in DragonLance (Chron/Leg).

They are the Jar Jar Binks of fantasy. Some stories can only be made worse by introducing unnecessarily childish comic relief.

I'm gonna hazard a guess that you didn't approve of tinker gnomes or gully dwarves, either.

For all the acclaim they've garnered, I think most people would have to admit that many of the Dragonlance books were not great literature. Chronicles started out pretty weak, but gained steam as it went along. The phrase "Look, Raist, bunnies!" is still with me decades later, so I'd call Legends pretty good novels. Whatever Dragonlance Book No. 256 was, I somehow doubt that it could match that level of quality.

The Dragonlance book I liked most wasn't a novel at all. It was The Guide to Taladas, a sourcebook for a separate continent on the same planet. It included cultures based on ancient Rome, Inuit tribes, the Uigar (or Uyghur) people, goblins who built towns and fought elf tribes who migrated with their herds, paranoid "emo" kender, and gnomes who were competent engineers. The companion book allowed players to make characters who were pseudo-Roman minotaurs, lizardfolk and yeti. The setting also included dragons whose alignment wasn't keyed to their scale color. Not so revolutionary now, but pretty impressive for TSR in 1989.

Forest King was one the last good novels imo as it finally explained the whole kender naming a nation after a former leader, but that leader was an elf and we all know that kender came from gnomes via the greygem and not from elves ... and how exactly does this blatant contradiction make any sense? I won't spoil it, but it was a very simple explanation that made sense in the context of the book. Maybe not the best explanation, but rather a 'historians are idiots' style of explanation.

They made a trilogy based in Taladas. Wasn't too bad.

The ogres trilogy on the other hand? Meandering plot. I hate baddies who sit around forever waiting to act and then instead of acting at certain points in history when it would've made sense they act when it doesn't.
And don't get me started on Solamnia getting cannons and fighting some giant golem thing that doesn't fit Krynnish history at all. >.^

To me, Krynnish history went totally off the rails when TSR developed a new game system and decided to force Dragonlance into it somehow.

The gods make and populate the planet. The greygem warps a lot of animals and people into monsters and weird fantasy races. People become arrogant and anger the gods, who slam comets into the planet, but stop short of killing everyone. Clerics lose their powers for a couple of hundred years because the gods are still sulking. Big stuff happens when the gods get over their sulk and start meddling with the world again. A mortal almost turns the local Deities and Demigods into a Monster Manual*, but changes his mind in suitably epic fashion. With time travel, even that is successfully blended into the main arc of the world's history. No problem for me so far.

Within a couple of decades after the whole centuries-long arrogant people/sulking gods arc is resolved, arcane and divine magic suddenly change completely, with wizards and clerics being replaced by totally different classes. A forgotten god decides to end the world, and all kinds of other unprecedented mayhem breaks loose. Whammo. You lost me, TSR.

*Goes on a god-slaying expedition, for those too young to catch the book title references.

Edit: Oops, we're way off topic again. Sorry.

For the record, I agree with those who say that we should wait and see what changes in each Alpha version before we decide that any given class will be crippled in the live game. Pointing out the imbalanced elements in each Alpha version is fine. Assuming that those imbalances will persist into EE and OE might be unwarranted.